The Shaping of Popular Consent: A Comparative Study of the Sovie ...

“It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.” In other words, nationalism creates nations where they do not exist.⁷⁰

However, one might conclude from Anderson’s concept of nation-ness that the form or type of nationalism creating nations varies widely (and may even never be repeated) from one imagined community to another. However, by extending Anderson’s theory to include self-ness, the notion that establishments create individuals or, at least, a psycho-dynamic form of identification with other individuals where they/it do/does not exist (in history or fiction, for instance), the theory will more clearly recognise the possibility that groups may have structural similarities across both borders and time. In other words, under nation-ness communities may be formed into one nation for reasons such as the promotion of a shared language, a type of fashion made from an indigenous material, or perhaps the food of a specific plant, or the worship of a particular animal. All of these could vary so widely from one region to another as to make the foundations of a nation appear to be unique. But if we looked at the kind of individuals revered for uniting the communities into a nation we may not find so much variation. We might even find that nations have fundamentally similar heroes and villains. If it proved to be the case, this would suggest that seemingly different countries may be organised around similar essential principles and ethics. For example, Ben Keirnan’s The Pol Pot Regime⁷¹ engages in a fascinating discussion in which he draws comparisons between Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge and Hitler’s Gestapo. Keirnan deliberately sought to problematise the traditional study of Cambodian history, which is based primarily on concepts taken from the political sciences. That is, he eschewed the standard reading of “third world” development and challenged scholars to consider the Khmer Rouge not simply as a development specific to Cambodia, third world nations, or Marxism, but as a phenomenon that can be found, in a remarkably similar form, in states existing during different epochs and organised around different ideologies.